Shane Hughes 4-5-26
Hughes, I'm one of the ministers here and if this is your first time to be in church ever or a while, we want you to know we're glad you're here. This is a good place to be a part of. And we've been going through a series leading up to today about the Apostles Creed. It was this early baptismal confession that the early Christians said as they met Christ in the waters, much as we saw today.
I don't know if you've ever heard about Brian Johnson. Brian Johnson is a tech billionaire who kind of retired from the industry to see if he could prolong his life. And Brian is spending about $2 million of his own money each year to see if he can increase his lifespan now. And if you look at this and you go into this one thing, he'll say that is fascinating to me, in fact, it gave me pause. He said, you know, there is a person alive today that will live to be 150 years old.
And I thought about that for a while and I'm not sure I'd want to be 150 years old, because here's why. Now follow me out. It might get a little sci fi, but just hang with me, all right, like if this means that I could stay 35 for 40 years or 50 years, okay, maybe right, like that would work. Or if I could say 22 for 60 years, okay, yeah, no problem. But.
But if this means that I stay 120 for 30 years, I don't know, right? There's kind of two sides to this, this world of progression that we see. You know, on one hand, there are cassette tapes in cars that allows you to hear music for the first time, your choice. And an immunotherapy that can cure disease. On the other hand, 20, 25, 30 year old me was pretty immature.
And if I wasn't growing at that time, I don't know if I would want it. In fact, I think I would have more potential for destruction of myself and those around me just given more time.
Here's where I want you to land with me.
Living forever without redemption. We have a name for that. Living forever without redemption is hell. And proximity to grace is not the same thing as receiving it.
Proximity to grace is not the same thing as receiving it. Just look at the story that Jesus tells about the older brother in the prodigal. He never leaves his father's estate and he is never pictured inside the house.
And so we come to the last three words of our creed. Life everlasting. Amen. Luke opens his resurrection account with women, which is a detail that would have actually been. Been very productive, provocative in the first century.
It's a culture where women's testimony was not admissible in court and Luke places the first witnesses of the empty tomb right there. Which is one way you can understand that Luke is not afraid to tell the actual story of resurrection. It's one of the reasons why you can believe in the story he tells, because he's not afraid to hide this difficult part, this difficult truth that's not incidental. That's Luke making a theological and social statement about who gets to be witness of resurrection. And they come at early dawn.
The meeting there is the deep dawn. It's that liminal moment when night hasn't quite given way to light. I don't know if you've ever been awake at that time. I was. I was awake at that time this morning.
It's when the sky is still dark, but it's turning blue to the east and the birds aren't singing yet. And these women carrying spices are coming to do the work of grief. They're not coming to the tomb expecting resurrection, they're coming expecting a body. And I don't know, in our culture, if we talk about grief in the right ways, I mean, I think we talk about the stages of grief, if it's some sort of bureaucratic process where you move through, you check the boxes and. And you come out on the other side with your paperwork in order, and then you look down at your paperwork and you see that those check marks have disappeared.
These women understand what we've mostly forgotten. The grief is work. It has tasks. Sometimes it requires you to get up before the sun does, to wake up in the middle of the night, to gather what you need, and to go even when it makes no sense. Especially when it makes no sense.
They weren't going to a resurrection. Let's be clear about that. They're going to do what loving people do when there's nothing left to do but tend, anoint, wrap a body, sit in the presence of the one you lost, and say without words, you mattered, that you were here and I am here. And I've sat with a lot of grieving people over the years, and what I've noticed is the ones who do the worst, it's the ones who get stuck are often the ones who never get to do the work of it. They were talked out of it too fast.
Somebody shoved a casserole in their hands and a Bible verse and said, he's in a better place. Now and close the lid on the whole thing. But the women came. They didn't have answers. They had spices and sore feet and broken hearts, and they came.
And here's what I want you to sit with today. The resurrection did not happen instead of their grief. The resurrection did not happen despite their grief. The resurrection happened inside of their grief, right in the middle of the work, right when they were kneeling in the dark, doing the only faithful thing that they knew how to do.
And I wonder sometimes if we're so anxious to get to the good News that we rush past the very place where God wants us to show up in the deep dawn, the dark not quite gone, but someone is faithful enough to go anywhere. And that, my friends, in that deep, dark place, that is where our story turns. Because when they arrive, they find the stone is rolled away. Notice Luke doesn't spend any time talking about the mechanics of how the stone move, because he's not interested in the mechanics. He's interested in the meaning of these two men appear in dazzling apparel, and we know what they look like.
We know how they're dressed, their wardrobe, because we've seen it in Luke before. Luke uses the exact same term. When Jesus is transfigured, these are messengers for the realm of the holy. And the women are terrified and bowing their faces to the ground. And the messengers ask what might be the most important rhetorical question in the New Testament.
Why do you seek the living among the dead?
And I think that question deserves to land on us, because we do this, don't we?
We look for life in dead places, in dead relationships, dead habits and dead versions of ourselves.
The angels are redirecting their grief into the geography of resurrection. And we spend so much of our time looking. We may not always have the words for what we're looking for, but the looking itself is constant in the refresh of our phone screen at 2 in the morning, in the way we scan a crowded room when we walk through the door to see if somebody notices us, if somebody cares. And the hours that we give to work that we hope that will finally make us feel like we've done enough. We look for something that will hold still.
We look for something that will never leave, and something that, when we find it, it will finally make that low hum of the anxiety of the world just go quiet for a while.
But I think the problem of the human condition is that most of what we look for are, in the end, dead things. Not because they were never good, many of them are genuinely good, but because we asked them to do only what the living can do. We ask a. A career to tell us who we are. We ask relationships to fill that room in our heart that only a God is large enough to occupy.
We ask for certainty to do the work of faith. And like the women arriving at the tomb with their spices and their grief, we find the stone rolled away and the spaces we expect to fill, expected to fill the space that we prepared ourselves to tend to. We find them empty. And I want you to notice, like the angels, they don't apologize for this. They do not say, hey, we're sorry for the confusion.
They say, why are you looking here? This is not where the, the living one is.
I think there's something worth pausing for a moment on that word. Looking to seek, to search. Sometimes with a sense of urgency, sometimes with a sense of want. It's the same word, word that Luke uses early in the story when 12 year old Jesus goes missing and his parents search for him in Jerusalem for three days. It's the same word used in the parables.
The woman who lights a lamp and searches for the lost coin, the shepherd who leaves the 99 to search for the one seeking is not a sign of weakness in the New Testament. It's a spiritual posture.
But the question is not whether you're looking or where you're looking. The question is who, not what, who. And this is the shift with the resurrection that makes in the whole grammar of longing. We tend to arrive at our spiritual lives as consumers. I think we're looking for an experience or a feeling or a framework, a fix, something, something that will work.
But. But Easter refuses to be reduced to a transaction. The question that you might ask at lunch today was, was that a good Easter service? Was that a good Easter sermon? That's not what we're trying to do here, because Easter, Easter is a person.
Easter is a. Is a man. Easter is Jesus standing in the garden saying your name in a voice you've been trying to hear your. And suddenly, suddenly you know exactly whose voice it is. And here's the truth that doesn't get said enough on Easter Sunday, surrounded as we are by, by the flowers and the brass and the choir and our best clothes.
Some of us in the pews are not sure that they believe any of this, not fully. And I think they want to. I think they're here because they want to. But they're also standing outside a tomb they are not certain is empty, holding spices they are not certain or unnecessary and wondering quietly deep down in the bottom of their hearts if the grief and the longing is just permanent weather of being alive.
And I want you to hear to those people, or perhaps that's to you, that the question that the angels ask, it's not a demand, it's an invitation. Who are you looking for?
Who? Who are you looking for? They don't ask, have you found him? They don't ask, do you believe all the right things? But simply, gently, with the patience of someone who has infinity, eternal eternity and is in no hurry, who is it that you're looking for?
Because I think this is the boldest thing that the resurrection dares to claim, the one that you've been looking for in every relationship that didn't quite satisfy, in every accomplishment that left you oddly hollow, in every moment of beauty so acute it almost hurts when you thought this, this is almost it. That one is not in the tomb, that one is not in the past. That one is not in the category of things that can be tended and preserved and mourned. That one is loose in the world and he is calling your name. And then the angels speak the Gospel.
They tell the women the truth. He is not here, but he is remembered. He is risen. For remember how he told you while he was still in Galilee. And Luke at this moment, ties us back to Jesus own words in chapter nine and chapter 18.
The resurrection isn't some sort of surprise ending. It's the fulfillment of the promise that Jesus made. The word remember here is crucial. It calls to theological reflection. This isn't just an event, it's a revelation that reorganizes everything that came before it.
And so the angels summarize the whole passion. The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men and. And crucified. And on the third day, Luke's must. There is the language of divine necessity.
This wasn't a tragedy that spun out of control. This was a plan.
And there's something worth pausing in on. How we end the Apostles Creed. We confess the resurrection of the body, and then we say life everlasting. Amen. And I think for most of us that have grown up in church or have any sort of belief at all, or even ever attempted to pray, Amen is a word that you say all the time, and you may not even know what it means.
Amen is sort of a word that translates as, like, I give my assent, I agree to this. Hear, hear. That kind of thing. Let it be so. It's an affirmation so that when we all pray together, we can all say yes, collectively, together.
But that what that means is the last substantive thing that we confess, the last belief we declare before we seal it is life everlasting. It's not just life as eternal duration, like that time that never.